2/8/2022

speaker
Linda Tybring
Chief Financial Officer

Tybring. I'm the CFO for Tobii Dynavox and been in this position since 2018.

speaker
Fredrik Ruben
Chief Executive Officer

Right and in today's call we will cover the events during the fourth quarter of 2021. We will also summarize the full year of 2021 and we will end the session with a Q&A session where we'll take questions from you basically. All right let's dig in. Tobii Dynavox It's a very mission-driven company, which we're going to see here on this slide. If you click, please. Thank you. That was one too many. In summary, the fourth quarter of Tobii Dynavox, a very, very eventful quarter. Yes, we did experience the effects of a continued and unfortunately accelerating pandemic, which had significant dampening effects on our ability to conduct business. The split of Tobii Group into two parts was also completed on December 9th. We successfully listed Tobii Dynavox in a so-called Lex ASEA process on NASDAQ Stockholm, where after the shares of Tobii and Tobii Dynavox started trading independently from each other. In mid-November, we communicated our first collaboration with Apple with the launch of the communication aid TD Pilots, which you by the way can see right behind me. This collaboration has actually been years in the making and enables a user to control an iPad basically using only her eyes. In October, we announced the agreement to acquire the Belgian headquartered voice synthesis company Acapella Group. We anticipate to close this in the beginning of this year. We have voluntarily submitted this deal for clearance by competition regulators. The accomplishments listed here were completed in an environment heavily and unfortunately in an accelerating way during the quarter affected by the pandemic. The pandemic also affected our ability to conduct business. It had outbreaks among our staff. We had outbreaks among our customers, pushed plan meetings and interventions into the future. It's also important to note that the interaction between Tobii Dynavox, us and the prescribers, is not seldomly conducted in the user's own home. And that kind of paints a picture on how the pandemic affects and the restrictions associated with the pandemic affects our way to operate. The disruptions and the increased cost in supply chain and logistics worldwide remained in the quarter. But it's super important for us to stress the fact that the negative effects that we're all experiencing tied to the pandemic are assumed to revert into a normalized state once this is behind us. Now I will spend a few minutes just to share some of the fundamentals about Tobii Dynavox and the markets we are serving. I can highly recommend you all to, if you haven't, to listen to the recording from our Capital Markets Day that we conducted in November, which can be found on the TobiiDynabox.com website under investor relations and financial presentations. But I will still just highlight some of the fundamentals about Tobii Dynavox as a business. So as mentioned just before, the most important thing basically for us working in the company and our guiding star is to look at our mission statement which reads we empower people with disabilities to do what they once did or never thought possible so this includes helping anyone from a children born or diagnosed at a very early age with conditions such as autism or cerebral palsy but also to users who are diagnosed later in life where things they once were able to do using a computer or communicate has been simply taken away from them. That includes people with, for example, ALS or brain injuries. Tobii Dynavox is the clear world leader in communication aids and associated assistive technologies. Our market is extremely underserved or under penetrated. It's estimated that some 50 million people around the world have a condition rendering them unable to communicate on their own, unless they have a solution such as ours. Still, it's also estimated that only some 2% of the people that are being diagnosed every year, roughly 2 million people are actually being helped. So the rest are more or less silent or locked into their own bodies. Tobii Dynavox, as a company, we are a truly global player. We operate directly with our own field force in first and foremost, the US, which also represents some 74% of our total business. But we also operate directly in the UK, in Norway, and in Sweden. In addition to that, we have a growing presence in China, which serves us both internally with supply and operations parts, but also an increasingly way for local sales into the Chinese market. In addition to this, we have some 60 additional markets that are being served by networks of reseller partners. And in select markets, we also have our own staff on the ground working as account managers, local trainers, and the like. Tobii Dynavox serves the entire user journey and all the stakeholders in the ecosystems needed for this. The hardware, which we're probably most known for, is an important yet only one part of our entire offering. If you look very kind of generically at our offering, it starts with, on the left, the content. In this case, we have developed and we continue to develop the world's largest library of communication symbols called PCS, which we, of course, use ourselves in our product, but we also license to other industry players, but also to other types of companies, such as Microsoft, who have them integrated in their office suite of products. In addition to that, our newly acquired synthetic voices solutions plays a similar role in terms of content. If we then go to the right, we add this into software that we build, typically tailored towards the applicable user groups. and then in addition to that we innovate design and produce the tailor-made devices which the software and the content is is run on sometimes with features such as eye tracking they're typically always compliant with medical standards fda mdr etc and are ultra rugged in terms of design and functionality we then take part in the assessing and the evaluations of assisting the prescribers to have their users eventually obtaining a device. We also take a majority of the labor and the paperwork needed to do the processing for funding, et cetera, from either public or a private insurance system. And then last but not least, we operate an extensive support machine and training infrastructure to help existing as well as prospect users to be maximum success for all the stakeholders. So that's an overview of the offering of Tobii Dynabox. Okay, so back to the fourth quarter. And if we dig down a little bit more in detail about the fourth quarter of 2021, as mentioned in the start, the fourth quarter of 2021 was extremely eventful three months. Our underlying business continued in a rather unchanged manner from before. That means that we continue to deliver thousands of voices to our users, but the continued pandemic had, as mentioned, a significant impact on our ability to meet with our users, but also our ability to deliver our products. This combined with a temporary yet unusually high cost for freight, which Linda will talk to a little bit later, and components shortage held back our organic growth to a mere 3% year on year. This combined with a weaker than usual profitability adding to a fairly overall complex environment for us to operate in. COVID for us meant outbreaks among our staff, It meant outbreaks among our partners, our customers, and part of our supply chain. We are all, of course, convinced that all these effects are temporary of nature, but with the pandemic eventually behind us, for us, it's back to normal on all fronts. That means including a clear, clear pent-up demand for our solutions on people that simply has not been able to be served. It is therefore quite reassuring that we, in spite of this headwind, managed to conclude three monumental milestones in the fourth quarter. So to name them in some sort of order, we launched the world's first eye-controlled, medically certified communication aid developed in collaboration with Apple. The product has received extremely good feedback from the market, and we expect a significant uptake in sales once the product has been added to tenders and once orders are being processed through the somewhat slow and bureaucratic funding systems in some countries. A second main milestone was that we agreed to acquire 100% of the Belgian headquartered Acapella Groups. Acapella has been our longstanding partner and leading provider of the synthetic voices to specifically assistive technology space. The acquisition of Acapela is not yet closed, so we don't see that in our books yet. We await a regulatory approval process, which is assumed to be done sometime during the early parts of this year. Acapela for us brings a very strong product portfolio. They have a very strong market position. They bring some 6 million euros of annual revenue at a healthy margin to the company. but maybe more importantly a very very competent and dedicated team of some 50 employees so as soon as the formalities are behind us we look forward to start the real work together and then last but not least and one of the reasons why we're sitting here right now is that on december 9th mark marked perhaps the single biggest milestone in the history of toby dynavox When we, after a very intense journey in separating the Tobii group into two parts and then listing Tobii Dynavox as a standalone company traded on NASDAQ Stockholm. If we then go up in the helicopter a little bit and look at the full year and conclude the full year of 2021, we can similarly to the fourth quarter, just conclude that the pandemic had a continuing hampering effect on our abilities to conduct business. 2021 was the second year in a row where we were unable to grow revenue substantially. However, and this is super important for us to stress. Throughout the pandemic, we have managed to maintain and secure our top line sales. It has never declined. This is rather unique compared to many other companies with a similar profile to Tobii Dynavox and instead who have instead experienced through the pandemic significant drops in sales. And additionally, if we dig a little bit deeper, we can also conclude that our strong market position and specifically our infrastructure in the US, which, as everybody knows, a country which was heavily affected and is heavily affected by the pandemic, has in fact showed a robust sales throughout the year. The reason behind this is a market which is hugely underserved and a big potential combined with the fact that we have a very strong offering, both in terms of product, but also in terms of infrastructure, for example, with contracts to reimbursement bodies. So with the not insignificant amount of work and bandwidth and money consumed by the listing process, I'm also confident that we now have an organization that will be even more focused on getting back to a solid top line growth. Like everyone else, we don't know exactly how the pandemic will affect us going forward, but it's hard at this point not to be rather optimistic about the fact that we see a clear light in the tunnel right now. I would like to hand over to you, Linda, to take us through the financials. Yes.

speaker
Linda Tybring
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Fredrik. Let's get into the numbers a bit. As Fredrik said, in the quarter, revenue grew with organically 3%. We have had some effect of revenue that was pushed from Q3 to Q4, but we also negatively impacted by revenue that was pushed into 2022. If we adjust for this, revenue grew 1% organically. Important to understand is that Q4 is normally a strong quarter for us since a lot of the insurance coverage ends end of the year. We continue, as Fredrik already mentioned, to have negative impacts by the pandemic. We have experienced outbreaks among our staff and customers. We continue to also have challenges with logistic and supply. We simply cannot get in enough products to meet the demand. Gross margin was hit by a one-timer of 4 million sec, but was also affected of increase of cost of components and freight. We remain confident, though, that the gross margin will return to levels since neither pricing or go-to-market model has changed. They are largely assumed to be temporary in nature. So looking at the cost Based last year, it was artificially lower by some 4 million related to received government grant, but also lower activity than normal. EBIT was affected both positively and negatively by the push revenue from Q3 to Q4 and from Q4 into 2022. Gross margin affected negatively, both with one tyrants of 4 million SEK, but also, as I mentioned, the freight and components cost that started to see the increase that we started to see during later part of q3 r d cost increased in the quarter with about seven million sec this includes that we also had increased capitalization and increased amortization related to larger product investment that was launched during this quarter such works on the td pilot one timers related to the separation was about five million sec Note also that we had the positive effect on currency on EBIT of 6 million SEK. So for the full year, revenue was flat versus last year. But if we adjust for the 10 million that was pushed to 2022, we had a 2% organic growth. We can also conclude that our strong market position and infrastructure in the US, a country heavily affected by the pandemic, has in fact shown a quite robust underlying performance. We have been challenged with both components shortage, logistic problems, pandemic, and this has affected both our revenue and gross margin in the full year. Gross margin has been negatively impacted by the extreme freight costs that we have seen over the year, almost double the price versus prior year. And we also see the increased cost on components. We estimate this to be around 10 million SEK for the full year. Again, this is a clear consequence of the ongoing pandemic and hence assumed to normalize over time. So if we start to conclude the full year EBIT perspective, I will try to simplify it a little bit and I will start from the top. So looking at the revenue, that was highly impacted the pandemic. We have not been able to meet our user component shortage and therefore not been able to ship product, but also delays in logistics. Of course, no one can know what revenue should have been without the pandemic, but we were really geared up for a much higher growth already going into 2020. Related to the delays in the logistics that we talked about earlier and the push revenue into 2022 of around 10 million, that affects EBIT of about 8 million SEK. Until this year, we have never seen this type of backlog. So for me, backlog is order not shift. So this is unusually high. And we normally have a pretty fast process from when we get an order closed until we have shipped the product. So getting into the second effect on EBIT is the gross margin. As I mentioned already, freight has almost doubled in price during 2021, but also later part of the year, we have seen increased price on components. And if we summarize that, we estimate that it has had a negative effect on the profitability of 10 billion SEK. So the third effect on EBITs versus prior year is OPEX. The cost base last year was positively impacted by both that we had government grant, we had work reduction, we didn't travel at all, no events, et cetera, to a total of 22 million SEK. The separation from Tobii, we have had one-timers during the full year of about 8 million SEK. We also had had a slightly increase in R&D spend, but we have had lower capitalization increased depreciation and amortization, and the total net effect is around 9 million SEK. The increase in amortization relates to larger product investment that was launched both at the end of 2020, but also during this year. It's also worth mentioning that Tobii Dynamo has a large portion of its business in US dollars. We estimate that we roughly sell in US dollars for about 70% of our revenue and 80% of our cost in US dollars. which means that the net effect on EBIT is not that significant, but of course it can have some timing effects. But therefore note that we also in the full year had a negative effect on revenue related to currency, but we had a positive effect on currency on EBIT level of 7 million SEK. So let's talk briefly about our balance sheet. At the end of the year, we had 197 million SEK in cash at hand, During the last quarter, in conjunction with the separation from Tobii, we have cleared all the transaction and our balances, which means we have repaid the loan to Tobii. We have purchased a perpetual license related to mainly the trademark to be able to use Tobii in conjunction with Dynox. We also received a shareholders contribution from Tobii. But if we adjust for the transaction related to the separation from Tobii, our underlying cash flow from continuous investments, it continued to be positive. If we look at our net debt, including lease, it was 409 million SEK at the end of the year, and the leverage of net debt in relation to the last 12 months EBITDA was 2.6 times.

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